Enrichetta Chiaraviglio-Giolitti

Chiaraviglio-Giolitti was particularly keen on education for disadvantaged children. She was an ardent supporter of the Italian educator Maria Montessori.[22][23] To assist Montessori in opening the Casa dei Bambini (Children's House) in 1907, she and other socially engaged and well-connected women promoted the advantages of Montessori's methods. They persuaded Queen Margherita to become a patron of the school.[22] A wave of anti-Montessori critics emerged after the 1911 conference held to discuss which method of instruction should apply to kindergartens in Italy.[24] The three methods most-widely utilized at that time were designed by the Agazzi sisters, Italian pedagogs; Friedrich Fröbel, German inventor of the kindergarten system; and Montessori.[25] Both the Agazzi sisters and Froebel advocated learning through guided play,[26] meaning that to meet specific learning objectives, adults directed the activities in which children engaged.[27] Montessori argued that children should be allowed to learn through their normal daily activities, which would lead them to learn reading and writing out of curiosity. At issue was whether or not the nation should endorse early education that introduced reading and writing.[28] in a 1912 interview with La Voce delle Maestre d'Asilo (The Voice of Kindergarten Teachers), Chiaraviglio-Giolitti supported Montessori.[29] Luigi Credaro, the Minister of Education, announced that spring that Italian kindergartens would follow Froebelian methods.[30]

In 1910, Chiaraviglio-Giolitti was appointed as the temporary superintendent of the Scuola professionale femminile «Margherita di Savoia» (Margherita di Savoia Vocational School for Girls), when the director resigned.[31] She founded the Istituto di San Gregorio al Celio (Institute of San Gregorio al Celio) that same year, which provided educational opportunities for mothers and children, as well as a nurse's training curricula.[3] The school opened in 1911 with the help of politician Teobaldo Calissano and others. As women at the time were usually not educated beyond secondary school, the curricula was designed to teach mothers how to care for their children and train school teachers to become in-home health visitors and assist school doctors as health inspectors.[32] In 1912, she was elected vice president of the Associazione pro bambini malarici (Association for Malarial Children). The association was involved in national studies to improve the health of children through laboratory research, upgrading of facilities, and training for caregivers in the drive to limit infections of malaria and provide treatment.[33]

Chiaraviglio-Giolitti worked on creating an asylum for orphans, and assisted in the creation of the floating school Caracciolo in Naples, replicating projects on the ships Garaventa in Genoa and Scilla in Venice.[3][34][Notes 2] The idea of the floating kindergarten was to take in homeless street urchins and provide them with the education and training they needed to become productive citizens.[35][36] Chiaraviglio-Giolitti met with Pasquali Leonardi Cattolica, Minister of the Navy, and first proposed that an asylum ship should be created for this purpose. She also recommended that the school should be under the direction of Giulia Civita.[36] The pyrocorvet Caracciolo was commissioned by the minister in 1912 and the school was inaugurated in April 1913.[34] As a board member of the Unione italiana dell'educazione popolare (Italian Union of Popular Education) and representative of the Ministry of Education, Chiaraviglio-Giolitti was designated to serve as coordinator of patronage for the newly formed Unione Navi-Asilo (Union of Naval Asylum).[37][38] Her duties included organizing local committees to promote and manage charitable donations for the Unione italiana dell'educazione popolare to benefit the school ships Caracciolo and Scilla and the Vittorio Emanuele II Orphanage in Porto d'Anzio, which served fishermen's orphaned children.[37] Board members Chiaraviglio-Giolitti, Paolo Boselli, David Levi-Morenos, and Luigi Luzzatti met regularly with the Ministry of the Navy and the Ministry of Education to coordinate the programs.[37][38] The Caracciolo school operated under Civita's direction until it was terminated by the fascist regime in 1928.[39]

Among other projects, in 1913, Chiaraviglio-Giolitti served on the national commission to reform secondary and normal schools.[3][40] The Daneo-Credaro Law of 1911 had set forth the need to study and reform teacher training, as there were insufficient and inadequately trained personnel to teach at elementary schools.[40] On the commission chaired by Guido Fusinato were politicians, social activists, teachers, school inspectors, and representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce.[41] Although it was proposed that a women's secondary school be established for girls who did not want to pursue teaching, the commission could not agree on its need.[42] They proposed co-educational normal courses which trained students both in the practical skills for teaching and in pedagogical theory.[43] Chiaraviglio-Giolitti presented a separate report, which although it supported the teaching program in general, recommended making it less didactic and more oriented towards a broader group of students including women, as well as middle- and working-class pupils.[44] Ultimately none of the suggestions were implemented because of a change in the political regime and the onset of World War I.[45]

Faced with food shortages during the war, the women's section of the Società Agricoltori Italiani (Italian Farmer's Society) sent a delegation of women including Chiaraviglio-Giolitti, Margherita Armani, Agnese Celli, Ester Lombardo, Cornelia Polesso, and Emilia Santillana to meet with the Minister of Education in 1919. They pointed out that the approved curricula at that time barred agricultural training and argued that both normal and rural schools should provide such sources to prepare for meeting food requirements.[46] Chiaraviglio-Giolitti expanded the idea to include garden cities, writing to Alfredo Frassati in 1921, of the benefits of raising children in the countryside.[47] She was one of the founders and a board member of the Unione Italiana di Assistenza all'Infanzia (Italian Union of Child Care) in 1923. The organization was designed to act as a network to provide assistance to mothers and children, giving them referrals to available aid from agencies, assisting them with basic child care supplies, providing education on child welfare through visiting nurses or health workers, and establishing connections to government to enact child protection laws and integrate those policies in hospitals, schools, and child care facilities.[48]

Chiaraviglio-Giolitti was a committed women's rights activist,[3] and a member of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane (CNDI, National Council of Italian Women).[32][49] In 1907, she began working on an initiative to assist women and children who emigrated. She was elected as a vice president of the CNDI's Segretariato femminile per le donne e i fanciulli emigranti (Women's Secretariat for Women and Children Emigrants), along with Maria Lisa Danieli-Camozzi (president), Carolina Amari (vice president), and Beatrice Berio (secretary).[50] She participated in the 1908 first suffrage congress held in Rome, presenting a paper on emigration to Brazil.[51] In 1914, Maria Pasolini-Ponte and Chiaraviglio-Giolitti, respectively president and vice president of the Società per la coltura della donna (Society for the Culture of Women), organized a series of lectures for women at the Roman College.[52] The following year, Italian women formed two branches (Milan and Rome) of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, which would become the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1919.[53][54] The national executive committee was made up of Chiaraviglio-Giolitti, Anita Dobelli Zampetti, Rosa Genoni, and Elisa Lollini-Agnini, each of whom immediately came under suspicion by authorities for subversive activities.[55] From 1919, Chiaraviglio-Giolitti and Dobelli-Zampetti edited the WILPF column which appeared in the suffragist publication Il Cimento (The Trial).[56] Women's suffrage had been granted to European women, except in France and Italy by the end of World War I and WILPF in Italy became one of the main organizations pressing for the vote.[57] The rise of fascism in 1922 made Italian WILPF members and other anti-fascists targets of the regime. Their meetings and events had to be moved to various venues to avoid attacks from fascist gangs, making it difficult to keep the organization functional.[57]